D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad - Chapter 2105 Further Cleanup

Chapter 2105: Chapter 2105 Further Cleanup

— Kat —

When Kat woke the following morning, her first order of business was to shower and then get started on some breakfast but it wasn’t her most important thing. That was talking to Lily once she woke. It just so happened that the running water from the shower managed to do that today. “Hey Lily, how are you feeling?”

Lily transformed back to answer, yawning and stretching as she did so, twisting her back into a painful looking shape but Lily seemed fine with turning herself into a temporary pretzel. “Yeah I’m fine, a bit tired perhaps… but why wouldn’t I be?”

“You’re shadow magic took a big hit remember? We were worried it might remain in poor condition for a few days, up to a week,” explained Kat with a slight glare. While it was good Lily wasn’t worried about it, the fact she couldn’t even remember why Kat would be worried was a touch annoying. If she went to do something important with her shadows and they broke apart that would be really bad. Especially if they were used to block an attack.

“Oh, right,” Lily admitted with a slight grin. Flexing in a few more directions before throwing herself off the bed, Lily summoned up her shadows and started to move them. Forming a few claws and slicing through the air, a solid shield that had a good amount of detail on it and lastly… a propellor hat. Kat wasn’t sure why Lily went with it, but if her goal was to make Kat laugh, she succeeded.

“Hmmmm…” mumbled Lily.

“What does hmm mean?” asked Kat even as she poked at the connection between them to ensure her girlfriend was fine.

“Well you already have most of the answer,” said Lily with a roll of her eyes as she felt Kat’s mental investigation. “As you can feel… it seems like most of the way fixed but also only like fifty percent power? Maybe? Like I’ve cleaned out most of the light mana but the last little bit is still drastically impacting my full power…

“But I also think that if I spend some time running mana through my shadows I might be able to clear the rest out. I wouldn’t want to fight immediately, but even if I don’t spend time fixing my shadows directly I’ll probably be back to full power tomorrow morning. Though… hmmm… I suppose there is the worry that I have just a tiny bit of light mana I can’t get rid of but I doubt it’ll get to that point,”

“Are you sure? Because that seems like the sort of thing that could happen,” countered Kat.

“Ah… well maybe if it was specifically designed to infect shadows I could see a… variant? I guess? A variant of light mana that could do something like that… but this is just light mana that’s been concentrated. My shadow is breaking it down and there’s just… so much more shadow mana. I can’t see some tiny speck of light causing me issues, and I’m sure I could just crush it with the weight of my mana and attention if it got to that point. Though…” Lily trailed off with a sigh.

Kat raised an eyebrow indicating for her to continue. “I think I’m missing a bit of permanent mana in my shadow. It’s hard to tell, because it’s usually just an automatic thing these days. I just slowly feed it more and more mana while I’m not doing anything. It doesn’t really ’stick’ properly. You might only get like… a tenth of a percent of the mana you put in after that initial setup phase but it DOES make my shadow strong.

“I think some of that might have been burnt away… but not much, and as I said it’s hard to tell because it’s not really something you can easily quantify. It’s not free-flowing mana anymore so… it’s… it’s more like looking at a wall and trying to guess how many litres of paint were used to paint it. And I mean, for people like us specifically. I have NO idea how much paint anything takes… but I know the answer sort of?”

“Well as long as you’re fine…” Kat said as she leaned over and gave Lily a quick kiss on the cheek. “Then I suppose I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Lily nodded, “Yeah, it should be fine. If I’m back in the tent with the three alchemists I’ll have time to rest. Even if I’m using my shadows I won’t really be using much mana. Certainly not more than I regenerate, the ingredients aren’t heavy,”

Kat nodded along and gave Lily one more kiss before going down to make everyone breakfast. She did note that at some point one of the pre-prepped dishes had been eat, but Kat simply shrugged. She’d left them in the house’s stasis area for a reason. If someone wanted to eat them that was fine.

Breakfast ended up being a quiet affair. Appoline spent the entire time distracted and scratching at her throat. Perhaps she was thinking about ways to fix the scarring. Hedera kept quiet as well, with Tweedle looking half dead. The small gnome clearly was not a morning person and seemed to be looking around for something… coffee maybe? Or the equivalent she used. With everyone so quiet Lily and Kat just spoke mentally with each other, chatting back and forth about the possibility of fantasy coffee and what it might taste like, or if they should’ve just got out some tea for Tweedle.

Once dinner was over the group headed off as one, heading for the same guard station as before. It was basically at the centre of the barrier and made for a good enough staging ground for Kat to come back to for more potions. It seemed that after the incident yesterday the alchemists had received a much bigger tent with more ingredients and a better setup for brewing. This would hopefully keep someone from attacking them from afar and when Kat brought it up, she was informed that the tent was magically reinforced. It might not stand up to multiple attacks but it could block the first volley every time. That would be enough to have people reacting to attacks, even when they couldn’t see off into the distance.

Glancing through the barrier Kat could see the poison was being worked on but… she wasn’t sure how much progress she’d really made after the previous day. Things had seemed somewhat cleared up in the areas she’d previously covered but leaving things over night had resulted in a lot more of the poison either spreading out or becoming airborne or just… something.

When Kat reported this back after one round of poison cleanup, Appoline had a suggestion. “The poison pools that you froze may have melted. Worse, they were always designed to vaporise, especially when thrown into the air. It’s possible that even without the plants to help them along the pools are still leaking poison into the air,”

“Should I try and clean them up now then?” asked Kat.

Appoline shrugged, “The stuff we’re making for you isn’t going to work well on the poison. One of my failed products might help you… though I’m not sure where they ended up. We just sort of left yesterday and I’ve got no idea where they ended up. Hmmm… perhaps send a message off with the guards to let Steel know about the problem? Perhaps getting visual confirmation might help as well? Even if you can’t clean them up right now you can still look.”

Appoline was nodding to herself as Lily passed the next ingredient over. Lily didn’t even really need to be told when to provide it anymore. She had a good enough sense of the process that she could estimate when the next ingredient was necessary. Though it was made easier by the fact she could just hold the ingredients in one of her many shadow hands for as long as required.

“Oh, wait,” Appoline said as Kat turned to leave. “Don’t use too many of those potions near the pools. If they ARE the reason the poison still seems so thick then removing poison directly around them will probably speed up the vaporisation process. One is probably fine, especially if it’s just to test things. Maybe two. Don’t use more than that though because I’m sure there’s a better way to deal with the liquid stuff.”

Kat nodded, “Alright, I’ll make sure not to do anything too crazy unless I’m testing things. What do I do if its still frozen? I… don’t really know how long it takes for my highest power demonically frozen ice to melt.”

Appoline shrugged, “Then there’s clearly something we’ve missed. Go investigate that or something? I may know some things about spreading poison but it really isn’t my focus. Just do what you think is best, I’m not your boss.” Fred snickered. “I’m probably YOUR boss for the moment though, so don’t think it’s too funny.” Fred notably didn’t laugh at that one.